Aim: The VISTA project is examining novel ways of integrating, presenting and utilising utility data with the aim of reducing the direct and indirect costs of streetworks. Inaccuracies in existing information, and the lack of methods to integrate, share, reuse and effectively communicate knowledge held by owners of underground assets means that more excavations are required to locate them causing unnecessary traffic congestion and increased costs for the UK economy; unnecessary damage to underground assets results in increased costs, injury and or possible death of workers and loss of service to consumers, both business and domestic. The School of Computing at Leeds University is an academic partner in the VISTA project.

Approach: The VISTA team at the School of Computing is employing Radius Studio software developed by 1Spatial to aid in the integration and transformation of heterogeneous utility data sources.

Results: It is envisaged that Radius Studio will significantly reduce the time taken to integrate these different assets and improve mechanisms of domain validation with the project partners. This will result in decreased development time and an increase in data quality and domain knowledge.

Partners: VISTA is a four-year joint project with a consortium of partners. UKWIR is the lead co-ordinating partner with Leeds and Nottingham Universities providing the research input. In addition there are over 20 utility and other sector partners. The project is principally funded though the Department of Trade and Industry Technology Programme with in kind contributions from the project partners. It builds on a pre-existing EPSRC funded project, Mapping the Underworld.

The School of Computing at Leeds University is an academic partner in the VISTA utility data project. For more details, click here.